As reported by The Guardian, hackers have carried out a “malicious” cyber attack on Telstra, creating connectivity issues for some home internet users.
Telstra reported the denial of service attack on its servers on Sunday which led to widespread internet outages in Australia’s eastern states.
A denial of service attack floods a network with traffic or information to trigger a crash, denying legitimate users access. Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane were the main outage hotspots. The telecommunications giant insisted customers’ personal data hadn’t been compromised and apologised for the outage.
DDoS attacks are extremely frustrating and it can often be difficult to establish the origin or even the reason for the attack. Motives range from ‘script kiddies’ testing their skills, to professional cyber gangs initializing a test attack in preparation for something bigger, right up to nation-state attacks. Therefore, it can be difficult to direct threat protection unless a complete threat analysis is carried out.
Each year we see huge networks taken down that were once thought highly unlikely to be affected, which highlights the necessity to continue to ramp up DDoS protection. Worryingly, if such an attack is an initial test to see how weak a vulnerability is, potentially a larger scale attack could be imminent so it would be advisable to not only up DDoS protection but to plug all known gaps immediately.